Unpremeditated Thoughts

We Resorted to Ordering Pizza on Halloween October 11, 2009

After a couple of years of being too old to Trick-or-Treat, my friend Rob and I got bored one Halloween. We were right at that age where we were too old to go around the neighborhood and ask for candy, but young enough that there weren’t too many Halloween parties for our age group going on either. Rather than being lame and playing Parcheesi with the folks, Rob and I thought that we would have a little fun this year and scare unsuspecting Trick-or-Treaters that came to the house . We had the most brilliant idea that was sure to scare everyone that came to the house. I had an evil gorilla mask just for the occasion.

The plan was that I would hide below ground in the window well right next to the porch and when someone came to the door and knocked, I would jump out of the window well in a single leap and scare them all. It was the perfect plan and we were set for a night of pure fun and entertainment. However, the night ended up being quite different from what we planned. My parent’s house was near a highway and most parents didn’t like taking their kids anywhere near a busy road (I don’t blame them now, but I did back then). So, I waited and waited in the window well, but almost nobody came to the house. My mom gave out decent candy too. None of that toothbrush or pencil crap. I think that the original plan was for both Rob and I to trade-off wearing the mask. However, there just weren’t enough people coming to the house to make it any fun. Many people would turn around a house or two before ours because they wanted to stay away from the busy road.

Rob and I weren’t about to give up on the whole night, so we decided to give it one last shot. People weren’t going to come to our house to trick-or-treat, so we had to get them to come to the house for some other reason. By this time we were getting hungry and my mom had warned us not to eat all of the candy that we were supposed to give to kids that came by (We ended up being able to eat most of it anyway when almost no kids came to the house that night). So we decided that we would order a pizza. That way, we would get food and we could scare the pizza guy when he came to the door to deliver the pizza. It was the second brilliant plan of the night. Never mind that the first brilliant idea of ours didn’t pan out so well.

We ordered the pizza and shortly after, the pizza delivery man arrived. Little did he know that I was lying in wait in the window well wearing a gorilla mask ready to scare him. I kind of hoped that he would be so scared that he would drop the pizza and run as buying a pizza was quite an expensive meal for me when I was that young and I could have used a free pizza. As he approached the door, I jumped out of the window well and yelled as loud as I possibly could through the mask which I figured is what gorillas would do out in the wild just before catching their prey. To my utter disappointment, my gorilla scare tactics had not even phased the pizza delivery guy. He didn’t even flinch. Once I was done belting out my all-but-terrifying roar, there were a few seconds of awkward silence and the pizza delivery guy said, “That’ll be $14 please.” I honestly can’t say that I remember the exact amount that he asked for, but I gave him the money with a modest tip and felt like a huge failure. However, I only thought about the failure for a couple of minutes and then I was just too excited about eating pizza. I didn’t really talk about the experience for several years because if word had ever got out, I knew I wouldn’t ever get hired at a haunted house or corn maze because I would have been known as the kid that couldn’t even scare the pizza guy. I never ended up working at a haunted house anyway, but I wanted to have my options open just in case I were given the opportunity someday.